


wish away

by Crykea



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [10]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: 5 + 1 Things, Angst, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Fluff, Gaslighting, Gen, I tried anyway, Sort of? - Freeform, a tale in knives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 04:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19221817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crykea/pseuds/Crykea
Summary: Peter’s just trying to be known! He’s trying to create change! Mag’s going to teach him how!Or5 times peter didn’treallyquestion Mag, and one time he did.





	wish away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LaddieLiam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaddieLiam/gifts).



> jackie requested this eons ago and i just got around to writing it
> 
> Its kinda hard to write peter but i tried!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Enjoy! I wrote this in a few hours oops.
> 
> It kind of hops between moments in Peter’s childhood w mag so theres no real linear timeline wrt his age
> 
> Beta-ed by SpaceJackalope

“Where’s your knife, Peter?” Mag’s voice was tired. If he really  _ really  _ focused he could hear an amused note in his tone, alerting Peter to the fact that there was something he wasn’t picking up on. There always seemed to be something he was missing. How was he supposed to be the best thief in the world if he kept missing all the cues. He scrunched up his face behind his cracked glasses and stared up at Mag. “Remember--”

 

“I know, I know. First rule of thieving: A thief who loses their own things is barely a thief at all.” Peter said urgently, trying to find some way to make up for his apparent failing.

 

“No, first rule of thieving is that nothing is ever as it seems. What are you missing?”

 

“I don’t know!” Peter cried in frustration, too exhausted from a day of intense training to remember to keep his voice down. Mag lurched forward, shushing him. His eyes were warily glued to the mouth of the alleyway the two of them had taken shelter in, but his hand was gentle as it stroked through Peter’s hair placatingly. After a moment of tense silence passed between them and Mag seemed sure that no guards had been alerted to their location, Mag took a step back and squatted down to look Peter in the eyes.

 

“Think back. When was the last time you saw your knife?” Mag pitched his voice lower out of caution. “You were just practicing with it.”

 

“I was just practicing with it,” Peter stated, pushing up his glasses as they started to slip down his nose.

 

“Good. And when did you lose it?”

 

“When I threw it at the wall?” Peter cocked his head to the side, looking over to where Mag was standing before. There was a knick in the wall from the blade of his knife amongst a field of other divots that had been created as he’d practiced throughout the day. “Wait, do you have it?”

 

“No, I don’t. Try again.” Mag shut him down, placing his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looking at the wall over his shoulder.

 

“But you were just sitting over there where the knife was, and I didn’t see it fall.”

 

“Did you go over and look?”

 

“No...”

 

“Well?” Mag shoved him forward lightly, causing Peter to stumble over his laces. A pile of crates balanced against the wall, emptied by years of looters and homeless people like Mag and Peter. Trying to show how thorough he was, Peter crawled behind the crates, looked underneath them, even went so far as to crawl inside a couple to see if anything was there.

 

“Nope!” He called out, quieting his voice at Mag’s insistent  _ “hush” _ , “All I see back here is this.” Peter popped back up over the lip of the crate, waving a scraggly looking street cat that looked more bone than animal in his arms. Mag laughed and called it a night. They’d find his knife in the morning. The cat spent the night coiled in the crook of Peter’s knees, looking for warmth on the city’s cold street.

* * *

Since meeting Mag, Peter had owned many knives. Some were long and slender, some serrated and multicoloured, some meant more for cooking than for slitting a man’s throat, but they all did the job. Mag liked to bring him home souvenirs from his thefts, usually a knife of some sort, but sometimes food, sometimes a badge from a uniform, sometimes an earring from an opera singer’s costume. They never did find Peter’s first knife. It was left somewhere in that alley as they were woken in a hurry by a group of street kids picking a fight with each other in their alleyway. The knife itself had been short with a light, squat, serrated edge--what Peter years later knew to be a throwing knife, but at the time was big enough in his little hand that it had seemed like a regular cooking one. 

 

It didn’t matter anyway, Peter had had many knives since then. He was a bit of a collector in that aspect of things. There wasn’t much that people like Mag and Peter could collect, nor was their much that they could own that didn’t serve a purpose. When you lived your life on the go-- running, training, hiding, sleeping on the streets--owning frivolous things didn’t have any sort of appeal. Knives, though, knives Peter could carry with him. They were small, they were light, they were flexible, they were easy to hide. Peter had made a bit of a game of finding new inconspicuous places on his person to hide his knives. Mag was pretty good at guessing correctly how many he had hidden on him, but Peter was getting better at hiding.

 

“Peter, I seem to have misplaced my blaster,” Mag called out in a hushed tone to Peter. They were hidden on either side of a hallway, trying to stay unseen in vain as they’d already been spotted on the way out. Hence the hiding. “You need to give it back.”

 

“I don’t have it,” Peter called back distractedly, reaching up his sleeve to find a little knife to throw at the guard who was just about to turn the corner. Mag had stolen a blaster from a dead guard a couple days ago and it had very quickly become his most prized possession.  _ After you, of course, Peter,  _ he would always laugh.

 

“Yes, you did. I know you stole it from me.” Mag said, urgently, “You and your sticky fingers are always getting us in trouble.”

 

“Listen, Mag, I can upturn all of my pockets if you wish to show I didn’t steal it, but we don’t really have  _ time.”  _ He accented his point with a knife to a guards throat. 

 

“I can’t help until you give back my blaster.”

 

“I don’t  _ have it _ .”

 

Mag sat with his arms crossed safely hidden behind the wall as Peter took care of their pursuers for them. “I must have imagined you taking it from me then.”

 

“Yes, you must have,” Peter said through gritted teeth, though with Mag’s insistence he suddenly wasn’t sure if he’d actually taken the gun and just forgotten.

 

“I guess you’re just going to have to get us out of this mess. After all, the first rule of thieving is ‘always be prepared!’”

 

“I guess I will,” Peter yelled in frustration, his eye catching the glint of the blaster lying on the ground in an arm’s reach from Mag. Right beside him.

* * *

 

 

There was a knife stuck in the meat of Peter’s thigh, and he was trying really  _ really _ hard not to cry about it. He was thirteen years old. That was  _ practically _ grown up as far as he was concerned. A little injury shouldn’t be making him shake as much as he was. Maybe it was actually the way Mag was whispering insistently over and over that he was going to be okay that was making him shake. He was in a lot of pain after all.

 

“It’s okay, Pete, Come on. Breathe with me, Deep breaths. Hey,” He tilted the boy’s face up so that he was looking at him instead of the blade in his leg, “Stop staring at it, you’re just scaring yourself. First rule of thieving: Don’t look at your injuries; it just makes them worse.” Peter whimpered at that, “No, no, come on Petey, take a  _ breath _ .” 

 

He was going to be fine. The knife in his leg didn’t mean anything. He was going to be okay. Mag was going to help him. He was going to be fine.

 

Peter ended up blacking out as the blood pooling underneath his leg became too much. His muscles spasming around the blade in his leg didn’t exactly help with the pain, but Mag said he was fine. He was fine. He was okay. He was going to be fine.

 

He woke up with a bandaged leg, no longer bleeding. Years later he would realize the limp wasn’t really going to go away after all, but as he was thirteen on a dirty street corner with a bandaged leg and a sleeping Mag beside him, he felt better than fine. He got to keep the knife.

* * *

 

 

There’s an alarm going off somewhere, but Mag told him not to worry about it. He’d pulled Peter up on the roof of a nearby building and laid out their blanket before unloading his recently acquired stash of food. It was fancier food than they usually had, so Peter knew he’d done a good job earlier on when he’d been practicing his pickpocketing downtown. 

 

With the food eaten, the pair laid down. Mag had his hand up, pointing at the stars overhead. Nighttime on Brahma was always Peter’s favourite time. Daylight on the planet was entirely manufactured due to their distance from the sun, so when the floodlights overhead had been turned off and the sky was clear, the night was more star than darkness. 

 

“The first rule of thieving, Pete: Always know your surroundings.” Mag had a smile on his face, a special smile that Peter only really saw when he’d done something  _ especially _ good, or if a heist went exceedingly well. Feeling proud of himself, he burrowed in under Mag’s long jacket and aimed his gaze at where the man was pointing. “Look up there. Do you know that one?”

 

“Mmm...No,” Peter hummed, snuggling closer, “What‘s it?”

 

“That’s  _ Lepus _ . It’s a little rabbit; do you see it?”

 

“No.”

 

“Pretend there are lines connecting the stars. Watch my hand.” Peter trailed his eyes sleepily after Mag’s hand, kicking his feet excitedly when he saw the shape, “Hey now, stop that. You’re just like a little rabbit yourself, aren’t you? Little rabbit?” Peter laughed loudly, thrashing his legs as Mag tickled him, “Okay, okay. What about...that one? Do you know what that is?”

 

“No!” Peter exclaimed still laughing as he tried to settle back in against Mag’s side, seeking warmth as the city began to cool down.

 

“Do you see those three stars all in a line? Near  _ Lepus _ ?” Mag pointed and Peter nodded, “Follow my finger again. Do you see the man? That there is  _ Petya _ . He’s holding a bow for arrows and a big knife do you see?” Peter gasped and looked wildly between Mag and the star shape.

 

“Me? Petya like me.”

 

“Petya like you! Look, those three stars make up his belt. Legend says that  _ Petya _ was the son of a sea god who could walk across the water. Doesn’t that sound familiar? You’re going to be just like that, Peter, just you wait.”

* * *

 

Peter was standing on the edge of a rotting building at the very edges of town before he thought to wonder where Mag went. There was a group of angry street kids chasing the two of them, having been caught pickpocketing, and before he knew it, he was standing on the edge of a building, rocks clattering around him. The three boys were younger than him, but Peter hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, so they all loomed over him. And Mag was nowhere to be seen. Again.

 

The boys scurried closer, scaring Peter into taking another step back. He began to sweat as his foot met air instead of the crumbling rubble of the rest of the roof’s edge. The smell of rot from the street below mingled with the smell of blood making it hard for Peter to breathe. One of the boys was holding a very strange looking weapon, the likes of which Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen before. It wasn’t a blaster surely, and it was too curled to be a knife, but it was certainly sharp if nothing else.

 

Where was Mag?

 

“Stop running.” One of the smaller boys of the group sneered, mouthing something in Brahman that made even Peter wince. “There’s nowhere for you to run anymore. Why don’t you give us back out stuff and we’ll leave you...mostly...uninjured.”

 

Peter impulsively tried to take another step back, his body forgetting that it had already tried that once before.

 

Where was Mag?

 

The apparent brawn of the group took another step forward. Peter did  _ not _ start to cry. There was only a foot of distance between Peter and the boy’s strange sharp not-knife.

 

Where was Mag?

 

He couldn’t just let these boys--

 

He didn’t even have the--

 

Mag was the one who’d taken their things he didn’t--

 

Peter took a few rapid breaths nearing hyperventilation, closed his eyes, and stepped off the roof.

* * *

“Mag, what do you plan to do after this?” Peter was older now. He and Mag were equals. Or, at least, that was how he saw it. He was pretty sure Mag saw it that way as well.

The pair were standing in similar uniforms, in a bathroom. Peter was leaning against the wall in a way neither he nor Mag even considered could be casual. His weight was placed evenly on his bad leg, and his hand kept twitching in the direction of the knife it was closest too underneath his clothing. At the question, Mag let out a long exhale, looking around the tiled bathroom walls for answers.

“Enjoying life without the constant fear of being murdered by the sky is fairly high on my list.” He eventually settled on, grinning at Peter with a wink. It wasn’t the right time to joke, but they were locked in a bathroom in the sky and Peter was having a really hard time catching his breath. The joke made Peter scrunch up his face like he used to as a child.

“You know what I mean,” He rolled his eyes, “What’s next for Peter and Mag?” Weirdly enough, the edited question was what made Mag pause. Once again, his eyes left Peter’s to stare instead at the tiles. This time, however, his search was unsuccessful apparently.

“Well, Pete, I suppose what you do is entirely up to what you want to do,” Peter raised an eyebrow at him quizzically even though Mag still wasn’t meeting his eyes, “All jokes aside, I think I...might want to retire.” Peter was so shocked by the statement he scrabbled away from the wall and ended up leaning far into Mag’s space. The bathroom was no place to argue. They had a job. Even still…

“Retire? You? I don’t believe it. Someone would have to chain you to a resort planet first.” Mag didn’t flinch, but from spending so much time with the man he could tell that not flinching was a choice. The man’s eyebrows twitched upwards minutely and he darted his eyes toward the door, gesturing for Peter to lower his voice. This was no place to argue. They had a job to do. Even still. “Well, I certainly won’t be retiring. I’ve hardly gotten started, and I want to be big, Mag, the biggest. I want everyone to know who I am. I want the wealthy to fear me 11 and those in need to call for me. I want--” They needed to be quiet. They shouldn’t argue. They were working a job, 

Mag laughed at his apology, pulling Peter in for a bear hug. In a couple hours Peter would have this man’s blood on his hands and no one to remember his name. In a couple hours he would be bloody, and tired, and world weary beyond his years. He would have no father at all--biological or...otherwise. In a few years, he would still have a rusty uncleaned knife with this man’s blood on it, and a limp in his bad leg. A wound felled from the same knife. In a few minutes, Peter would find out that Mag had his knife the whole time. The first knife Mag had ever given him. He hadn’t lost it in the crates after all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me online!  
> twt: cryke_art  
> main: crykea  
> podcast: alicedaisytonner


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